Formerly a struggling single twenty-something

Going Up…But Not That Far

There are certain things that become less socially acceptable after you graduate from college. Sleeping late. Going out on Thursday nights. Going to The Kells on any night (especially Wednesday). But, I’ve recently discovered, one of the biggest college taboos somehow becomes more acceptable once you enter the working world.

When did it become okay to take the elevator to the second floor?

Now, obviously I’m not talking about the elderly, people with disabilities, or people carrying something heavy. But 99% of the time, those are not the people taking the elevator to the second floor. Those people have absolutely no excuse other than laziness.

The thing is, in college, if you took the elevator to the second floor, you would not be able to talk to anyone else in that elevator ever again. If looks could kill, you’d be mutilated by the eyes of every person going to a higher floor. People might even make some snide comment if they were having a particularly bad day.

And it wasn’t just the second floor that was off-limits. So was the third floor, and my friend who lived on the fourth floor of an eight-story building used to fret about whether it was okay for her to take the elevator. You couldn’t take the elevator from, say, the third floor to the fifth floor, either. It was a terrible breach of etiquette, not much different from stealing someone’s parking spot or dumping their laundry on the floor. We were college students, and we may have procrastinated on homework, gone to Mary Ann’s instead of studying, and decided sleep was unnecessary, but we were going to get back to our dorm rooms fast, dammit, and no lazy person was going to stand in our way!

But the people in my office who need to get to the second floor don’t seem to remember that.

This morning, I got into the elevator with another woman, and after I pushed the button for the fifth floor, I watched in dismay as she pushed the button closest to 1. She let out a yawn, then looked at me and said, “I’m sorry…still tired.”

Yeah. Because your yawning is the worst thing you just subjected me to.